Master Hsing Yun in the NYT *sigh*

The coast....

Tomorrow I hope to have a post on Democracy Challenged: The Chen Shui-bian Years, an edited volume on the Chen years. But today....

Hsing Yun, the political monk: Last week Ian Johnson wrote a puff piece on Master Hsing Yun and Foguangshan for the NYTimes. Johnson is a respected China correspondent. The piece perfectly illustrates what I am constantly noting: that even the best China writers can't write about anything Taiwan. I wasn't even going to mention it, but Johnson responded thusly to a pro-Taiwan friend of mine who abused Hsing Yun on Facebook, saying:

A Q and A with an important religious/political figure is a perfectly legitimate role of journalism. It is the way to go. Childishly insulting people and questioning the role of journalism is what's wrong with social media and why we're in this alt-fact mess.

As you can imagine, it took me a week to calm down from that remark. Haha. Why are we in the alt-fact mess? Because a ranking journalist like Johnson can research and write an entire article which simply side-stepped Hsing Yun's open and rich relationships with the KMT (he was a member of its central committee and is known as "the political monk") and downplays his longstanding work to use Buddhism to help annex Taiwan to China and "Chinese culture" to suppress Taiwanese culture.

Consider these remarks from the NYTimes piece:

But unlike in Taiwan, where it held special services during national crises and encouraged members to participate in public affairs, Fo Guang Shan avoids politics in China.

Foguangshan has the same politics as the CCP. It doesn't "avoid politics" because it doesn't have any reason to, the CCP heartily approves of its agenda. In Taiwan it plays politics by supporting the KMT. For example, when DPP turncoat Yang Chiu-hsing ran for mayor of Kaohsiung in the 2010 elections, Hsing Yun came out in support of him. He also supported Ma in the 2008 elections. Throughout his careeer Hsing Yun has operated as an arm of the KMT-CCP united front against Taiwan independence. This 2008 Asia Sentinel piece, easily found on Wiki, observes:

Of the four Buddhist masters in Taiwan – known as ‘the four high mountains’– Hsing Yun is the most political and the most openly pro-unification – to the point, in fact, that critics have suggested his politics have led him considerably far afield from traditional monastic concerns. He was a member of the central committee of the Kuomintang and in 1994 persuaded Wu not to run as an independent in the election for provincial government, to ensure a Kuomintang victory.

Imagine an alternative NYT piece, one on the importance of the Mazu and Buddhist cults as key nexuses of cross-strait pro-unification politics and political action. But we will never see such a piece...

...The truth is that the reason we have alt-facts is because the international media creates space for them by not resolutely and robustly printing facts.

Why did Hsing Yun refer to Chinese culture in his interview with Johnson? Hsing Yun himself said a few years ago (Taipei Times):

During a press conference at the forum on Friday in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, Hsing Yun said that “both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one family. There are no Taiwanese in Taiwan and Taiwanese are all Chinese.”

Which Taiwanese is not Chinese?” he asked. “They are Chinese just like you are. We are all brothers and sisters.”

Hsing Yun also said that opening the forum in China and closing it in Taiwan was especially meaningful because it would enhance cross-strait exchanges and help the unification of the two sides, the Hong Kong-based newspaper Ta Kung Pao reported on Saturday.

“The more [cross-strait] exchange we have, the more mixed we will be. Then we won’t be able to distinguish who’s Mainland [Chinese] and who’s Taiwanese — and we will naturally become unified,” Hsing Yun was quoted as saying.

This background is entirely missing from Johnson's piece. Hsing Yun doesn't just work tirelessly to annex Taiwan to China; he also puts in a good word on China's alleged ownership of the Senkakus from time to time (like in 2012).

There are some assertions that don't make sense:

In 1989, an official fleeing the Tiananmen massacre took refuge in its temple in Los Angeles. China retaliated by barring Master Hsing Yun from the mainland.

But Hsing Yun was in China in 1989 and in 1990 met with the President of China. See this old LA Times piece on him from 1990, which does a much better job of conveying what Hsing Yun is: a monk tycoon who has long wanted to get his organization into China, just like any other large corporation engaged in long-term marketing and expansion.

As the LA Times piece makes clear (and, if you know the answer, you can see it in the NYTimes piece too), Hsing Yun offered the equivalent of the Prosperity Gospel, but for Buddhism. This was indeed a trick -- Christianity is a totally me-centered religion, so it is not difficult to get adherents to believe in something as self-centered as the prosperity gospel. But Buddhism has quite a bit to say about the relationship between the Self and the World that is not compatible with modern consumer culture. Hsing Yun drew on a humanistic Buddhist tradition to recast Buddhism in a way that is compatible with modern consumer culture. Ka-ching!

For his claims about the effect of Buddhist organizations on Taiwan's society, I have not read the book Johnson cited, Democracy's Dharma (He informed me on FB, Ian is very kind). Color me intensely skeptical, since I have rather extensive, personal knowledge of at least one of those organizations. But an organization and a leader that supported the KMT throughout the authoritarian era, continues to support it, calls for the extermination of Taiwanese culture, carefully avoids confronting burning social issues such as land expropriation and corporate power, and never spoke out for democracy in Taiwan, isn't one that is going to change China.

Ultimately, the reason China accepts Hsing Yun is that they know perfectly well he won't do anything to rock the boat, and his adherents will not engage in meaningful social action, and he will continue to work to peacefully deliver Taiwan to China.

1C2S Take 2: Taiwan Sentinel ran a piece on Beijing's rejection of the Sino-British Joint Declaration.

The most shocking thing about Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang’s remarks on Friday, to the effect that the Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong of 1984 is no longer relevant, isn’t so much Beijing’s dismissing of a binding UN treaty but rather the outrage from around the world by individuals who should have known that China never committed to abiding by the treaty to begin with.

Of course, Beijing's announcement was fundamentally an announcement that war over Taiwan, the Senkakus, and the SCS claims is inevitable. Can Japan trust China to adhere to a treaty over the Senkakus?

And then there is Taiwan... who would make a deal with China now? If someone in the KMT tries to return to the "50 year peace treaty" policy that pan-Blue politicians have periodically been mentioning, everyone will just laugh.
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